From Rationality to Morality: The Collective Development of Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Anthropology

Kantian Review 27 (3):363-383 (2022)
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Abstract

While Kant’s account of humankind’s rational progress has been widely discussed, his views about the way in which this progress might have begun and the circumstances surrounding this beginning have been largely neglected. Implicit in such an omission is the assumption that Kant does not say much about the very beginning of human history or that whatever he says is of little philosophical value. This paper challenges these assumptions. I reconstruct Kant’s account of the emergence of reason by looking at his various conjectural and more literal remarks about our species’ transition from mere irrational animals into primitive human beings possessing a rudimentary form of rationality. Next, I show how this account fits with Kant’s broader view of humankind’s rational progress and its subsequent stages. By doing so, I elucidate Kant’s guidelines for achieving this progress in the future by unifying them with his regulative view of reason’s past.

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Olga Lenczewska
University of North Carolina at Wilmington

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References found in this work

Critique of Pure Reason.I. Kant - 1787/1998 - Philosophy 59 (230):555-557.
The Fate of Reason.Frederick C. Beiser - 1987 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Unsociable Sociability.Allen W. Wood - 1991 - Philosophical Topics 19 (1):325-351.
Kant, History, and the Idea of Moral Development.Pauline Kleingeld - 1999 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 16 (1):59-80.

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